Driftwood Community Church

Today, we take some time to acknowledge America's 250th birthday. We currently face deep division within our nation, and much of that division runs right through the church. Our commitment to the extremes on either side is hindering our witness to the resurrected Jesus. The way of Christ calls us away from those extremes and shapes how we live as citizens in the countries we call home. The way of...

Today, we begin to understand the basic understanding of the foundation and identity of the church.

Growing up, the fruit of the Spirit versus the fruit of the flesh felt like a moral checklist, a list of behaviors that existed for their own sake. But there's a deeper purpose behind them, one that shapes us into a colony of heaven here on earth, the church.

Whether it's the first couple in Genesis or the picture of the church in Acts, the authors of scripture have a habit of creating literary icons, models for what something is meant to be. We see it in individuals, in marriages, in nations. This week, we explore Luke's literary icon of the church in Acts 2, a Spirit-empowered people.

Pentecost is the day we celebrate two events at once: the arrival of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. Too often, the gift of the Spirit gets reduced to a doctrinal checkbox or sensationalized into a feeling or a language, missing the point entirely. Join us this week to discover why the Spirit was given to the church in the first place.

The Ascension of Jesus is often framed as "he went to heaven so I can too." That story is far smaller than what actually happened. Ascension is the story that releases us to be the body of Christ in the world, under the rule of a far more powerful king. Join us this week as we dig into what the Ascension is actually about.

Jesus did not come to simply improve our afterlife. He came to give us a life that is full, rich, and real right now. This week, we take an honest look at what that abundant life actually looks like in the everyday.

Every decision we make is driven by some kind of logic, whether it is what we want, what we fear, or what we have come to believe is true. This week we ask a simple but disruptive question: what happens to the way we think and live when we believe that love is the most powerful and lasting reality in the universe?

The resurrection was never meant to be just an event we observe once a year. This week we explore what it looks like to actually live it.

Today we move to our second scene on the way to the Cross. We turn to John’s telling of the garden arrest, where we encounter four different ways of responding to the way of the Cross.

On this first Sunday of Lent, we slow down and listen to the prayer of a dying man — Jesus’ final, heartfelt request to the Father. As we hear what matters most to him in that moment, we have to ask ourselves: Is the thing Jesus emphasizes so deeply the same thing we, as his Church, have chosen to emphasize?

As we close out the season of Epiphany, we make our way up the mountain of Transfiguration. There, two things happen. First, we see Jesus revealed as the One in whom past and present meet — the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets gathered into a single, living person. Second, in Peter’s response, we are given a mirror. His instinct to preserve, control, and hold on exposes something in us...

Today we explore one of the central figures of the Epiphany season, John the Baptist, and ask ourselves, how we, like John may become the epiphany of Jesus in our world.   

As we begin the new year, we want to engage the idea of God - who is God?  How do we know?  Why?  Because what we believe about God shapes who we become and how we engage the world.  The way we all engage people, especially those who are different from us, says more about what we believe about God than our stated doctrines.  

We wanted to take time to close out the year with a message about the Nativity.  A symbol of Jesus' birth, but even more so, a symbol of God's character and nature.  The nativity has been the victim of culture wars from both sides of the aisle, but if we really knew what it was about we may allow it to speak for itself. 

This year, rather than a full series, we are offering one Advent message. In it, we focus on what lies at the heart of Advent—and at the heart of Christianity itself—the defining characteristic of Jesus and of everyone who seeks to follow him: love. 

This week, we reflect on Judah’s life after the Temple’s destruction. God sends them, as His children, into exile—but even there, He calls them to live out the covenant: to be a blessing to the world. This call is not easy. We naturally seek security, comfort, and certainty before turning outward. Yet God reverses that order, inviting His people to find peace and prosperity by seeking the peace an...

This week, we examine the posture and attitude of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms—attitudes that ultimately opened the door to their destruction. They mistook wealth, military strength, land, and even the Temple as signs of God’s blessing. In truth, these were not blessings of approval, but expressions of God’s patient mercy. He had not destroyed them…yet. He had warned them, but they would not...

This week we make our way through King Saul and David, and spend most our time time talking about Solomon.  Solomon, often referred to as the wisest man in the world, is also the King responsible for the fall of Israel.  But Why?  This week we look at the very things that drew Solomon's affections away from God and toward the glories and riches offered by empire.  

In our Journey to Advent, this week we cover what it was the the Jews so faithful to the purity and holiness law kept missing that caused them to continually miss the life of their covenant calling.  

In this week's story we jump ahead to the story where Moses encounters God.  This text not only moves our story forward, but it begs the question from all of us, is our idea of God shaped by our position in life? Answer: Probably.  The texts challenge us to move beyond that which is comfortable to learn God in a way we may not have known him before. 

In this week's bridge talk we are going to take about thirty minutes to cover 600 years of Biblical narratives, bridging where we left off with Abraham and connecting the next part of our story with Moses.  In addition we are going to highlight many of the repeated patterns within these stories and the significance of those patterns.  

Today's story brings us to the end of Abraham and the idea of Covenant.  We explore what scripture means by covenant and how it is, those of us who are in covenant with God are called to approach the promises of God. 

This week we jump from the tower of Babel and we are introduced to our new man or character, Abram.  Abram, is a man who understood God, like most of us, according to the myths of his home society.  In our story today, we learn how God begins to change Abram's understanding of who God is, to make him into the man ready to live into the covenant. 

In this week's bridge talk we bridging the story between Babel and Abram, but we are doing this by looking all the way back at repeated motifs being told at larger levels of graduating magnitude.  We first see the same theme in the opening scene of scripture before there are humans, then we see it again in the first family, and so on.  Abram, begins God's new humanity called to live...